108 national geographic • january 2018
it drops down precipitously, and then it has this
long tail, which gives us some time to act and po-
tentially mitigate the warming.”
The ice that does remain in the Arctic may
provide a stable environment, albeit a compact
one, for organisms that depend on ice. “For
people concerned about habitats, it’s not that
you will sometimes have the summer ice off the
coast of Siberia and sometimes have the ice in
the Beaufort Sea,” Pfirman says. “Because you
couldn’t sustain a habitat if that ice was moving
all around. It’s actually pretty consistently going
to be banked up off the coastlines of Greenland
and Canada.”
“thiS iS a neWcoMer,” says Theo Ikummaq,
stooping and pointing to a delicate green shoot on
the rocky beach near our campsite. Ikummaq, a
60-year-old native of Igloolik, an island off of Baf-
fin, is a guide and adviser for our expedition. It’s
a cold and foggy June afternoon; the inlet we’re
walking along is still frozen. Clouds have covered
the sun for days now. Ikummaq carries a rifle over
his shoulder in case we need to scare away polar
bears. We’ve already spotted the tracks of one in
the sand only a few hundred yards from our camp.
The little green shoot, maybe a couple of inch-
es high, has no name in the Inuit dialect spoken
in this part of the Arctic. Ikummaq doesn’t recog-
nize it; he knows only that it’s another example of
how the land and life are changing here. During
our walk we’ve passed what Ikummaq says are
new features in the landscape: large circular
sinkholes, created by thawing permafrost.
Later that day, in the big tent where we have
our meals, Ikummaq tells me the names for a few
Arctic animals. An aarluk—“kills everything”—
is a killer whale; a tingugliktuq—“bad liver, don’t
eat”—is a horned lark. But some animals, such as
robins, are so new to the Arctic that Ikummaq, at
least, doesn’t know names for them.
With global warming, plant and animal spe-
cies from the south have started to move north.
It’s a trend that will only accelerate, says Bren-
dan Kelly, a biologist at the University of Alaska
in Fairbanks. As the habitat for Arctic wildlife
shrinks, the animals that survive are likely to
They don’t think of this dynamic aspect of it.”
In 2010 Pfirman was part of a team that iden-
tified the most likely location for the Arctic’s
last summer sea ice, work that has helped guide
the Pristine Seas effort. Comparing a variety of
computer models and satellite data, she and her
colleagues found that winds and currents con-
spire to funnel drifting sea ice from all over the
Arctic onto the northern edges of Greenland and
the Canadian Arctic Archipelago—a region of
spectacular fjords and more than 36,000 islands,
including Ellesmere and Baffin. Year after year,
‘Some people say it’s hopeless;
we’re on a trajectory where ice
is going to be lost. But it has this
long tail, which gives us time.’
Stephanie Pfirman, oceanographer
massive ice floes stack up in that relatively calm
zone. Some of the ice there is decades old and
more than 80 feet thick.
Pfirman and her colleagues realized that by
mid-century, this frigid haven would hold the
Arctic’s only year-round ice. Their discovery was
far from obvious. In some earlier climate mod-
els, Pfirman says, the Arctic’s ice cover simply
retreated evenly along its southern flank as the
planet warmed, ultimately settling right around
the North Pole. “ That makes no sense at all,
though,” she says. “ There’s no reason for ice to
congregate at the North Pole. It’s going to keep
moving until it hits something.”
Despite the steep decline in store over the next
several decades, a long, narrow band of perenni-
al ice will persist late into this century. If we can
end our reliance on planet-heating fossil fuels, it
could survive even longer—into a time when, just
maybe, we’ll figure out how to remove enough
carbon from the atmosphere to cool the planet
again. “ The ice models don’t drop down to zero,”
Pfirman says. “Some people say it’s hopeless,
because we’re on a trajectory where ice is going
to be lost. But if you look at the climate models,